Lead Community Managers Katie Postma and David Read reunite with Senior Sound Designer Nick LaMartina to discuss Stargate Worlds, the ill-fated Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello, everyone. My name is David Read. Welcome to episode 398 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. It’s 2006, and World of Warcraft is making Blizzard billions, and it’s becoming quickly one of the most profitable forms of entertainment: video games. And everyone is looking at each other saying, “What IPs do we have that we could adapt?” Stargate Worlds, massively multiplayer online game set in Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper and Jonathan Glassner’s television universe based on that IP. A dozen planets, a story set across those worlds that would have brought back Ra, explained the nature of the Furlings through an enemy called the Straegis, these crystalline creatures that would have brought forward a number of the connections of why crystals are so important in this world, for example. There was so much that they were pulling together for this thing, and then by 2009, it was gone. The 20th anniversary of that game coming together is this year. I’m still in touch with a few of them, and I would like to be in touch with more of them to share their stories before we start losing some of them to age and other factors. But also, I think the work that they created was so extraordinary that not getting some of these stories out there would be a shame. So, we’re going to hopefully spend the next few months discussing what could have been with a lot of these designers and find out some stories from the Stargate world that you really didn’t know were out there. I already heard, in this episode, a few stories that I remember and had forgotten, and I hope that you enjoy this conversation that I have with my counterpart, the person who brought me into the project, and my best friend at the project, and that’s where I wanted to start. And afterwards, I’ll go ahead after the credits and show you my original interview with him from the beginning, when I was working there because it’s been sitting around on YouTube forever, and it belongs to me. So, we’re gonna re-release that at the end as a companion piece for our journey together in this episode. Here is Katie Postma and Nick LaMartina from Stargate Worlds. I am privileged to welcome on two people who are very important to me and to everyone’s — no one is gonna take me seriously. Very important to me and to my development as a person, and a key chapter of my Stargate life that I’ve not really talked about. I have with me Katie Postma, who was the first lead community manager on Stargate Worlds, and lead sound designer, Nick LaMartina, who I immediately, upon finding out that I got the gig, was like, “OK, where’s the sound guy? He’s gonna be my best friend, because that’s my passion.” It really was that, dude, you really were my best friend for those two years there, and I’m thrilled to have you both here because, with one, I would not have gotten sucked into the legitimate, consistent Stargate paycheck space. It’s my first Stargate, proper Stargate gig, and with the other, I don’t think I would have remained sane for those two years. Welcome to both of you. I appreciate you being here. Katie, how are you?

Katie Postma:
I’m great. How are you?

David Read:
I’m very good. You actually joined us for the launch of the new Stargate series announcement a few weeks ago. It’s great to have you back.

Katie Postma:
That was fun. Thank you.

David Read:
Nick, welcome to Dial the Gate, my friend. How are you?

Nick LaMartina:
Thank you. I’m excellent. I’m really happy to be here. Stargate was the thing that launched my video game career, and it’s been a heck of a career since then. And I just realized it’s been almost 20 years. In August, it will have been 20 years that I joined Stargate at the Stargate studio in Mesa. I didn’t realize it had been that long — 20 years. What a start to my career it was, and I still think very fondly about all the memories we made there. So, I’m really happy to be here.

Katie Postma:
So, you were four when you started, got it.

David Read:
Geez, guys. I am hoping that this will be chapter one of a successive series of episodes. We’ll see who wants to get involved. We kind of put out some feelers and are seeing how things feel, especially with the announcement of the new TV series. A lot of people are looking back and assessing their relationship with this IP, and trying to feel their relationship out with it now. And I’ve been doing this channel for five years, and Stargate Worlds I’ve kept in the very back pocket, because it’s an intimate story for all of us. It’s one that has to be handled with gloves, because things unfolded the way that they did. And I think that it’s a story that everyone who got to participate in it gets to tell and deserves to tell, and I hope that they will be willing to tell it without animosity or sour grapes at this stage, but be willing — a few of them — to come on and say, “This was my experience. This is what I loved about it. This is what I didn’t love,” and just be able to share an oral history of their experience. So, I’d like to set the stage for that here with this kind of episode, because the intent here — as I did with Stargate SG-1: The Alliance with Ben Lenzo for Episode 349 — was to honor the developers on a project that they were passionate about, regardless of whether or not it launched. Doesn’t matter. It’s still Stargate, and I am privileged to have you guys here with me to discuss this now. So, thank you.

Katie Postma:
You’re welcome.

Nick LaMartina:
Thank you too. I’m really delighted.

David Read:
Nick, what are you working on right now? What’s going on?

Nick LaMartina:
I work for an audio contractor, basically. I work on a game called No Rest for the Wicked. It’s in early access. I’ve been working on it for close to five years now. And I’ve continued to enjoy a lot of success in my career. Video games have always been very important to me. This is the only thing I ever want to do, and anytime I talk with people about, “Oh, why did you get started, and how did you stick with it?” It’s always… I loved playing games as a kid. I loved sci-fi franchises. I loved all the nerdy stuff that a lot of us grew up playing and enjoying, and Stargate was this perfect little fit, a show I enjoyed consuming. I loved the characters; I loved the possibilities of you go in and you never know what comes out the other end. It was always just adventure, every single time. And really strong character development and really great lore, and there were so many elements to it that I think lent itself to being an excellent video game. And so it was really great to be able to get started with something like that so that I could take the various parts of my experience as a sound designer and a composer and really develop that and play with it and make it something that was so cool and fun and that I could share with other people, not just people that I was developing games with, but people that enjoyed it too, such as yourself, that were really into every little aspect of what that world meant and all the different details. And there were so many great things that made it the perfect property for this kind of thing.

David Read:
And there was… It was an endless trove of content to mine, and when you pull out and look at the 36,000-foot view, that can be as much, if not more, of a detriment than an aid — because it’s like, OK, we’re now going to tell an MMO, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, story. Now what do we pick? I can imagine it was paralyzing for you guys early on, because even when I came in, months and months into this project, the story hadn’t been fixed yet. And you’re building tools and building tools coming forward with this thing, OK, at some point, this will have to be done. How do you figure out what to start developing early on? You are a one-man department, sound, score, all of the elements. When you first sit down there and it’s your first real big gig… I never asked you this. How did you know what to start with first when you’re in there and you’ve finally got all the egg carton things up? OK, so now the room is sound reflection-proof, so that’s done. What comes next?

Nick LaMartina:
Honestly, the first part of it was telling them, “Hey, I think I want to also write the mus–” ‘Cause we had someone that was working with us, a guy by the name of Chance Thomas. He was doing most of the sound design and composition at the time. And so, I came in working primarily as an integrator, where Chance would do stuff as the external contractor, and then I would integrate it and then do some more engine stuff with the team to help them develop features and that kind of thing. But I told them, “Look, I know I got the job, but I can do sound effects too, and I can also do music composition. Can I take a crack at it?” And so, they were more than happy to give me a shot at it, and I think they saw the value in having that content be generated internally where we could work very closely with the teams, with our writers and our designers and our engineers, all of those folks together, ’cause sound, it integrates everywhere. It’s part of every piece of the experience. Nothing gets missed. And so, yeah, it was intimidating to get started, ’cause I didn’t really know initially — like hey, we’ve got this demo that we’re making for investors, but other than that, what happens? And so, there was actually a little tiny demo. I can’t remember what it was called. Shoot, there was a name for it, but it basically was just an outdoor area with a Jaffa and an eagle soaring over top, and then you would go inside, and there was this big brazier that had… or this coal pit, and it was basically just a tech demo of Unreal Engine. It was Unreal 3 at the time. I won’t nerd out on all the different aspects of like, “Oh, yeah, it was matinee back then!” We didn’t call it that. So, yeah, we had this tech demo that was basically just a Jaffa standing in a desert area with some music and some sound, and that was what they were showing everybody at the time. So. that was my primary task at the time, which was make sound for this, and it was basically just a handful of sound effects, and I added a choir track in the background ’cause my degree is in music composition theory and vocal performance, so I had a lot of experience with choirs. And so, I decided, OK, we’ll add a choir track into there, make that sound cool. And then there was a small video they were preparing at the time too, and it was Alana… I wanna say, Alana Sabin. She was working on it at the time, and I started doing one in parallel to help her out. And so that was while we were waiting for some of my software to show up. So, I didn’t even have the software yet for editing sounds and doing sound effects and all that other kind of stuff. I just had a bunch of my own personal software installed and said, “OK, let’s just get started. We wanna get movin’.” That was sort of like the start of things, which was just here are a couple of small little projects that we’ve got stood up right now. And then, once development started in earnest where it was determined Castle is going to be the first big one and we’re going to have this animatic here and then we’re going to have this other planet we’ll work on. That direction came later, but when I first showed up it was just this little tech demo that we needed sound for and it was my way of learning the tools and getting them recommendations for how we could get moving. It was very, very small and very — it was not fleshed out at all. It was just a little demo to start off.

David Read:
Katie, what are you working on at the moment? What’s going on in your world? And how did you get your feet wet into Stargate Worlds? What’s the story there?

Katie Postma:
Instead of starting with now, I’ll start at the start, which was… like you, I was a massive fan of an IP that — in a former life I was a hospital administrator, then I had kids and stayed home for seven years and wasn’t expecting much from a second career. I thought I’d just go back to doing what I was doing. And then I found this game Myst, M-Y-S-T, that was big in the late 90s and early 2000s and became a massive fan.

David Read:
I was obsessed with this game. Obsessed.

Katie Postma:
Right. It was kind of at the dawn of a bunch of things. Like when we first played Myst, we were on — I mean there wasn’t really much internet, but there were chat rooms that you could dial into. So, we would dial into chat rooms and ask for help or just meet other Myst fans. And then Cyan had their own chat room. So, I got to know a ton of Myst fans. And then just naturally from that I started helping and started moderating forums that sprang up and was asked to come interview to be the community manager at Ubisoft Montreal who were publishing the Myst games. And I got there to help with their MMORPG which was cancelled six months after I joined. Trust me, I thought for a while…

David Read:
Uru. Was that Uru?

Katie Postma:
Yes, Uru. And for a while I thought I was the kiss of death for all things MMORPG. Myst 4 was also being made at that time. So, I was CM for all of that. Then Myst 5 came out. And so a couple of years after that ended Joey Bar, who was at Ubisoft Montreal — loved Joe — had gone down to Cheyenne in the meantime when a few things were ending at Ubisoft, called and said, “Let me know when you’re finished wrapping up Myst 5.” — which was kind of like the final Myst game in the series — and I was doing some work on Prince of Persia, and they wanted me to work on Far Cry and it was getting further and further away from the type of game I enjoyed. So, when he said he wanted a CM for an MMORPG, I was like, “Yeah, sign me up.” So, I had seen the Stargate film, which was one of my favorite films of all, all time. Like up with Star Wars movies, Star Trek movie. I thought that film was so great because it was just so unique in what it — like even though the film itself was limited in scope, the potential was limitless and I saw that in the film. And at the time they were talking about a sequel, which didn’t get made, but I was just excited about the IP in general. I had only seen a couple of episodes of the show and Joe immediately sent me as many of the seasons as were out at the time of the show. So, I started watching. Even before I started my first day, I had probably seen the first two seasons in order. And I find when you binge-watch, you get such a different sense of things than when you’re waiting week to week and little details get lost, so there were so many callbacks and inside jokes and tongue-in-cheek moments that I adored. I adored every character. I couldn’t name a favorite at the time. I loved everyone in it. And then when I got to Cheyenne, I think I was employee number seven or something. It made me super proud to be in at that ground level. Before we had any way to welcome fans, before we had even announced to fans, I was there helping with direction. Just because it’s an MMORPG, we had to bake in community considerations to every aspect, and so things like safety, things like ways to connect inside and outside the game. All of that referral process, all of that. And so, I was tasked to help announce the game, help demo those little demos that Nick and others were making. That was huge, ’cause we took those then to… I’m trying to think of the ones at the time, ’cause they’ve all changed, but E3 and PAX and AGDC and GDC and all those places. After I left Cheyenne and when you took over and then we swapped again, I ended up coming back for a really brief time. I’m both really thrilled that I sucked you in, as you say, but I also feel like I threw you to the wolves and left too. So…

David Read:
That’s not how I feel about it, and we’ll talk about that in a little while. But…

Katie Postma:
But I wish we had worked together more. We didn’t overlap very much.

David Read:
Oh God, that’s true.

Katie Postma:
And I really wish… But after Cheyenne, we ended up working a lot together. I would see you out and about at a Comic-Con and at E3 and stuff, and those were the good days for me ’cause I got to reconnect with people. I ended up working with a lot of people that worked on Stargate with us. And now I’m still doing the same thing. I’ve worked for a lot of bigger companies that make AAA games, but recently, and probably the past 10 years or so, I’ve been working with indie teams, a lot of different indie teams on indie games. So, right now I’m working with Scavengers in Montreal primarily. And they’re working on a game in early access right now. It’s not even in open beta yet. It’s really super-duper invite-only early access, Nick. It’s called Saltation. So, if anybody wants to look up Saltation, we’d love to have you come check it out.

David Read:
OK. Nick, I glossed over, because I started at current and then worked our way backwards, how you were brought in. You were brought in under what title exactly, and how aware were you of the IP beforehand, and can you get into that a little bit more in terms of connecting and getting involved with Cheyenne?

Nick LaMartina:
Sure. I was brought in as sound designer. I was later promoted to senior sound designer, after some arm twisting. At the time, I was running my own small studio in Idaho with my wife at the time. It was this small studio, that was pretty revolutionary at the time ’cause we didn’t really have mobile digital recording. It was not very available at the time. And I had this idea, what if I took a rack-mounted server, stuck an audio device in it, and dragged it around Idaho recording choirs, high schools and colleges and bands and stuff? And that sustained our family for a couple of years. And it was really nice to be able to work with audio and enjoy that, but I was also feeling like I want to work on my own content too because I was an artist. I loved being able to help people out and provide them with ways to fundraise and enjoy their content, but I also felt like I had my own stuff too that I care about. And I was working on Half-Life mods at the time. That was sort of the way you would really get yourself recognized. The game jams weren’t really big back then, and there were some colleges that you could go to for game design and game development, but it was too late for me at the time ’cause I already had a degree and I didn’t wanna go back, so I decided, I’m gonna work on Half-Life mods. And while I was doing that, Liz was looking at ways to send our content out to other people and look for job listings and stuff, and she found this company in Arizona that was making a Stargate MMO, and we just sort of discussed it, “I like Stargate. We’ve watched this before and this is interesting.” And the interesting part was that they did not specifically mention they were looking for a sound designer. It was just, it’s in early phases, they’re fundraising, and they’re starting to get the studio stood up, and we thought, “Why the hell not? I’ll just send a demo. I’ve got some content; I’ll just send it to them.” And it was one of those right place, right time moments because they had just started looking for one. They hadn’t even put a job listing up yet. They had just started looking for one. And so, my demo landed on their desk at just the right time. And they got in a conversation with me and one other person — that actually I still am in contact with; Mike Heinen. He and I have crossed paths multiple times since then, but it turned out I was the one that got the job. And they flew me down to Arizona. We talked about Stargate. We talked about being from Idaho and the Utah area. We had a lot in common, and so that’s basically how it got started. I sent them the material at the absolute perfect time when they were just starting to think about audio and they needed somebody, so I was able to fulfill that role. And I got started almost immediately out of it, but as far as how much I knew about Stargate beforehand, it was a show that Liz and I would watch sometimes, and like I said, I loved all of the possibilities of it. I had seen the movie when I was a kid. I loved the soundtrack by David Arnold. I always loved all of the motifs and the really obvious themes that represented all the various characters and the way it would develop, and I’d also developed an appreciation for his soundtrack a little bit when I was listening to it in Independence Day — he wrote the soundtrack to that also — and I had a real appreciation for his talent. And so that’s how I would usually get drawn into movies and TV shows, was based on how cool is the soundtrack, and I love the sort of motif-driven characters and cultures and stuff. And so, yeah, Stargate was something that I enjoyed. I wasn’t fanatical about it, but it was still something that was up there with Star Wars and Star Trek for me, which was, here is this ensemble of characters, they’re gonna all these strange new places, and they’ve got really interesting stuff that they’re taking a look at, and it was sort of like enjoying the cultures of other planets and stuff, and everything was unique and different each time. Every time it’s a new adventure, and I loved that about it. So, it was thankfully something that I was into by the time I talked with them and I was able to share that passion with them, and we just really clicked. When I talked with Dan Elggren especially, he and I got along really well, and it felt like the right click between all of us. I know they were looking for someone that was probably a little younger and a little, I mean, not green, but certainly someone that was really excited about the possibilities of the world, and I definitely was that. And I think I was 24 at the time, so not fresh out of college, but at the same time I still had that feeling of the world is full of possibilities, and Stargate was that at that time for me too. So, it was a perfect fit.

Katie Postma:
You still had that new dev smell. David, you were a baby.

David Read:
I was 23. I’m nine months younger than Nick. I was a DJ in a music station in Southern Illinois and finishing my last months of college with a major in radio, television, and a minor in journalism, not knowing what I was going to do next, but I didn’t want do another six years in this little country radio station. And I had just gone a few months before up to Chicago — Creation Entertainment had a Stargate convention up there, and I met this lovely lead community manager at this Stargate video game who gave me this.

Katie Postma:
Oh, I remember that.

David Read:
And she was like, “So, this is what we’re working on right now. You can say this about it. You can’t say this about it.” I’m like, “Yes, this is very… oh my God!” On the inside, that was my inside, but on the outside, I was, “Yeah, that’s really awesome.” Some level of that.

Katie Postma:
You were the only one that got one. You were the only one.

David Read:
Really?

Katie Postma:
Mm-hmm.

David Read:
Wow.

Katie Postma:
I mean, In that moment.

David Read:
I got a few more, so um…

Katie Postma:
We had them to give away, and I wasn’t supposed to do it then, but I gave you one because… Trust me, I recognized what you were to the community then, and just in general. We can talk about it, but when I saw you there, it wasn’t your knowledge of Stargate, it wasn’t your radio voice, it wasn’t that. It was the way you engaged with the people around you. You would literally be sitting beside Don Davis, and you were like, “Hey, Don,” and you were just interacting with all the fans that were at the convention, and I just felt immediate kinship to you…

David Read:
Same.

Katie Postma:
I recognized in you that you wanted the best for everyone around you. To me, community management espouses the things that we hold dear about Stargate itself, which is the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. “You go, we go,” that kind of mentality where they would never leave. This is why I stopped watching Universe.

David Read:
We don’t leave a man behind.

Katie Postma:
This is why I stopped watching, because they literally used the leave a man behind element to get rid of a problem child, and I was like, “Nope, that’s not… That would never happen in my Stargate.” I alluded to that during the last interview. But anyway, no, I saw that in you. People that you had only met maybe online, there was instant kinship, and I was like, “I have to talk to this person…”

David Read:
Had you decided you were moving on at that point?

Katie Postma:
No.

David Read:
Not then?

Katie Postma:
Maybe. I don’t think so.

David Read:
Because December comes along, I’m pretty sure it’s December, and I’m sitting there on AOL at work,

Katie Postma:
Six months later, I think.

David Read:
And we were just casually talking, and then I think a light bulb went off in your head and all this stuff. I’ve got it saved somewhere, it says, “OMG,” exclamation mark, “Do you want a job?” question mark, exclamation mark. And I’m thinking to myself… “Sure, what do you-” Before the end of that night, I remember calling home and saying, “I think I’m gonna apply for this thing in Arizona.” And I graduated just a few weeks later. It had to have been January when I was flown up or over. January is when I started. And I sat down with Dan. And then Joe and Jim something downstairs, I forget his name, one of the original guys who were brought on board.

Katie Postma:
Jim Brown.

David Read:
Jim Brown, that’s it. And within three or four days of coming back, after falling in love with everybody, I got it. And February 3rd or 4th, I was out there and ready to rock and roll. My parents had no idea what to think, their only kid, and it’s like, “Man, he’s two days away now.” That’s it. And it was a whirlwind after that. I didn’t have any idea what I was in for, and — I had some preconceived notions about what I was doing there, but mainly, I was there to sit and listen and take things in. And it was awe-inspiring to watch this team of 50 people grow and watch them play, moving the empty square piece on the bunch of squares and moving it as the office began to get bigger and bigger, and trying to figure out where people are going to go. And I had eight desks in two years. Nick was lucky because he had at least a room. And then they moved us downstairs, and there was a whole other thing there. Then we felt more disconnected from the team. But it was a whirlwind. Did you get a… I’m guessing you got a job offer for something else?

Katie Postma:
I did. I went to Cartoon Network. I would never have left you otherwise, but it was a big gig. It was a children’s gig at the time. My kids were quite young, eight and six or something. It was a kids’ MMORPG. I, at the time, I was so torn, but it was both a career move and a personal move. It was slightly closer to home than Mesa was, ’cause I never — you moved down, I never did. One of the reasons… So, first of all, the job was yours to lose, because I’m like, “Everything you’re looking for…” When I was brought on for Myst, I wasn’t a community manager. I was a Myst fan. You were a Stargate fan to the nth degree. If I was an 8 out of 10 Myst fan, you were 11 out of 10 Stargate, and so —

David Read:
That was a double-edged sword.

Katie Postma:
Yes, for sure, because I’ve had the same problems. I understand it’s hard seeing the sausage made for something that you really love. So, I get that. However, like you say, your job was to sit back and listen, but it was also to absorb and then be a conduit for the people around you and for that community. And you were also a dream content creator already, as you continue to be to this day. So, you had elements of your community management style and who you are as a person that really complimented what I had started to do. You kind of carried that forward. And I don’t know how much of this you use in your day-to-day now, but we started with nothing. As you said, Nick, those demos were not used to share with the public. They were used for investors. And we ended up, David, between you and me, we got 78,000 people to register on those forums for that MMORPG. That’s huge. And with nothing to show. I remember we made a video one time, and it was the logo appearing slowly with the music swell, and then it kind of dissipated, and fans were like, “Yeah.” And I was like, “No, we didn’t show you anything.” They came for the curiosity and the announcements, but they stayed for the camaraderie that you were building, the elements that we were sharing. Even if you were sitting in a dev meeting and you left not being able to share, you could still convey your excitement, your hope, your feeling of anticipation, that you could say, “Guys, if you like Stargate, you’re gonna love this. Oh, if you love MMORPGs, you’re gonna love these elements.” We could not say much. We were — I used to joke, “If you just believe in us, we promise it’s not vaporware.” But that was a massive community. And you and I are both friends with some of those people to this day that came through out of curiosity in signing up for being in the alpha and the beta process.

David Read:
Oh yeah. AJZ, Adam Zaltz, he was one of our moderators. And he’s a friend to this day.

Rebecca Orozco [clip]:
What can you do to keep people from turning the sound off when playing Stargate Worlds?

Nick LaMartina [clip]:
I can’t force them, first of all, not that I would want to. I thought about it one time and I had to say no ’cause that wasn’t nice. But the best way I can do it is by making it useful. And the way we do that is we extend the sensory experience beyond the monitor so that they’re surrounded with field of awareness and input, not by taking information away from the visual, but by providing them with a different dimension of description that is unique to the sound itself. Bugs over here to indicate that this is a dark area that’s maybe deserted, and we wanna hear trash rolling over here because there might be monsters crawling about and the rats are gonna come and get you. Or this music should be dark and scary because it is a threat to you, but if you come back as a really big guy who’s gonna waltz through that whole experience, don’t play that music anymore because it’s not relevant. If I have something to say, we say it, but if it’s not important, don’t say it, and that’s a real difference for how we handle that.

David Read:
Nick, I remember sitting with you and having my first interview with you ’cause I wanted to release these series of interviews over the course of the game’s run. We sat down and we talked probably for an hour, and the whole thing got truncated into five minutes. One of the quotes that I remember you saying is that you wanted to compose, you wanted to sit down and create stuff, and then you get this gig. I’ll never forget this: “I have all the composition work I could possibly want.” What was it like trying to find the tone for this thing? You’ve got David Arnold; you’ve got Joel Goldsmith doing the series. Was there an intimidation there to make your own sound? I know that you don’t get intimidated much because once you have something, it’s like, “I’m gonna go for this.” How did you feel… around the tone of this, whatever this was gonna be?

Nick LaMartina:
Oh man, there was an intimidation that actually occurred. I don’t know if I ever even told you this story, but I can laugh about it now. At the time, I was utterly mortified, but basically what happened was I was getting ready to start doing some more composition for the title theme in particular because my feeling was, we are not the Stargate movie game. We are not the Stargate SG-1 game. We are Stargate Worlds and so our content, our themes, our art must stand on its own as a separate pillar of the Stargate franchise. I wanted to create something that was unique. I didn’t want it to be the SG-1 theme ’cause it was Stargate Worlds. It wasn’t SG-1 online. It was Stargate Worlds. And I started writing it, and I realized you’ve got resources available maybe if you contact Joel Goldsmith or David Arnold or something and maybe ask them a little bit about their process and start a conversation about what went into that. And they might be good collaborators, you never know. And so, I found Joel Goldsmith’s email address and I emailed him and I said, “Hey, I’m the composer for Stargate Worlds. I just wanted to know, tell me a little bit about the themes you’ve written and what have you enjoyed about it? What do you feel is strongest about it, what are some ways that you convey certain characters or themes about cultures?” And it was an invitation to have a conversation. I didn’t hear anything from him for a while. And then suddenly I got this email, it was about a month later, from him and he was livid. The thing I remember in particular he said was, “It sounds like you want the Joel Goldsmith sound, but you don’t want to pay for it.” And so, he was very upset with me that I contacted him about this. And he actually went to Wright & Cooper. Then Dan came to me weeks later and said, “I got a red flag email from them. Can you explain to me what’s going on?” And I was like, “Look, all I did was email them and ask, ‘Hey, can you tell me a little bit about your composition process? ‘Cause I’m curious.'” And thankfully, I was not in trouble over this, and they stood in front of me and said, “No, we don’t want Joel writing this, we want our guy taking care of this.” And the situation did go away eventually, but I was utterly mortified that all I had done was try to start a conversation with this guy ’cause I admired his work and he was really upset ’cause he felt like I was trying to take something away from him. So, we did not end up collaborating. We didn’t have any conversations after that. And I made sure not to send any emails on anyone’s behalf anymore. And that was a big life lesson with regard to how you communicate with people and sometimes you just have to go through others even if it feels like it’s a good intention like, “Hey, I wanna participate in this process with you.” It doesn’t always come across that way. So, that was a big sort of trip at the beginning. A ‘shooting yourself in the foot’ early on. But thankfully they didn’t take it away from me after that incident ’cause it would’ve been really disappointing.

Katie Postma:
That’s not a good life lesson at all. I think you should always reach out. You should… Look at Judd Apatow, for goodness’ sake. Reach out to people. The worst they can do — I used to think — the worst they could do would be to say no. But the worst they can do is to write to Brad and throw you under the bus. But that’s too bad because I think part of it is that no one knew what this was. I remember distinctly, Chris Judge early on understood everything. Right away he was really into it, and I was out — I hate name-dropping, I’m so sorry — but Mike Shanks and I were out in the smoking area — I won’t say why we were out there — at Comic-Con. And he’s like, “Can you please just explain exactly what this is?” Because MMORPGs were brand spanking new. They were within five… There was UO and there was EQ, but there wasn’t tons of MMORPGs. There was…

David Read:
World of Warcraft, I think Burning Crusade was just coming out.

Katie Postma:
…WOW had just started. WOW started in four, late four. But you had no clue. And if they weren’t gamers… famously, Momoa didn’t even have a smartphone or a computer until he was 90 years old or something. When I met him at that same one I met you at, David. No, maybe it was another one later, but one of those. He was completely offline and a self-proclaimed Luddite. So, explaining what we were doing, especially to potential voice talent, for example. You’re starstruck but at the same time you’re doing a job and you’re in the universe now. We were in the green room together because they were going on, SG-1 would go on, and then we would go on, and then Atlantis would go on. So, we were sandwiched between these huge panels in the big hall at Comic-Con and stuff. You were fanboying out. At the same time, you were there to do a job and they were asking you questions. And it was all very heavy. But I do remember trying to explain what we were doing. So, I imagine you had a little bit of that splash back, Nick, as well, where, “Who is this and what is he doing?” And yes, there were video-game composers back in the day. Now we know what that entails. And now it’s on par, in my mind and in most people’s hearts, with what movies and television composers do. But back then, I think there was a lot of unknown around what we were doing that… You must have had that too, David, where you had to explain what this was.

David Read:
Sure. But I wanna clarify — and I do remember Nick’s story now, having reheard it again. I got to know Joel better after I had left the project. And what I had come to find out was he was a video-game composer. His video-game music is actually, in some cases, more well-known than his film and television work. And what we arrived at in terms of the conversations between us was he really wanted to compose the music for Stargate Worlds. This wasn’t a film and television composer who was like, “Who is this rat? Get him off my shoe.” He saw Nick as someone who had taken a job that was, in his opinion, his to lose. He really would have wanted this thing and would have taken it with bells on. And Nick reached out to him saying, not knowing any of this, “Look, I’m the one that’s tasked to do this. I’m an admirer of your work. Can we start a dialogue?” And Joel took it too far. And it’s too bad because I know that that was not… his intent wasn’t to skewer Nick because the whole thing was handled poorly.

Katie Postma:
His heart was hurting about the project in general then. And not being wanted on it.

David Read:
Exactly.

Katie Postma:
Is he still alive, by the way?

David Read:
No, we lost him. We lost him over 10 years ago at this point.

Katie Postma:
I thought so. OK. Bless him.

David Read:
And I’m producing something in his memory right now that finally got some traction behind the scenes that I’m really excited about.

Katie Postma:
That makes sense then. The reaction, thank you for the context, ’cause that does make sense.

David Read:
I wish that it had been known, because at the very least, Stargate Worlds could’ve said in some kind of a way to Joel, “Look, we’re really interested in cultivating some brand-new talent here. We found this kid. We believe in him. Would you be interested in having a conversation with him?” And that’s really… In hindsight, that would have been better off coming from Dan to send to Joel and say, “Hey, we’ve got this guy. We really believe in him. We love your work. Maybe you can consult with us for a little while or something.” Extend an olive branch…

Katie Postma:
Give him one world.

David Read:
… because that’s really what he was —

Katie Postma:
Can you imagine?

David Read:
Or something. Or give him —

Katie Postma:
You could have a different artist.

David Read:
I’m sorry, Nick. But give him a theme. Collaborate with him on the theme. I personally think that that would have been really cool.

Katie Postma:
No, the theme was so good, but I get where you…

David Read:
But thank you for that beautiful segue, by the way. Nick had written this — and please, God, I pray that you still have all of these elements. Nick had created this theme for the game. He wasn’t thrilled with it. He liked it. Correct me in the pieces where I’m wrong, Nick, fact check me in the modern-day parlance. The second trailer came out, I think it was the second trailer, or the first full trailer. And Nick composed this battle-ready piece of music with these brass horns that just shot through the roof. And then crescendoed with choir, and I heard it, and then I went to him and I said… “This is your theme. This is the theme for this thing.”

Nick LaMartina:
That’s accurate. There was a theme that I had written. It was about two and a half minutes long and it had the motifs that were associated with the different themes and then played through them and then ended on this nice little crescendo at the end. And it felt very gamey, I guess, or almost TV-like. It was supposed to be, “Here’s the Stargate Worlds theme.” I felt OK with it, but it still felt a little cheesy for some reason, ’cause I think at the time, I was trying to write it as if it was this standalone thing where it was just, “This is what the identity is.” And I hadn’t invested myself necessarily in the various worlds that we were creating at the time. Because we were much further along in development by the time we were ready to start, I think we were showing it at Comic-Con ’08, if I remember correctly. And I remember that for a very specific reason. That was a big time. I had written it to make it sound like it was a show, but that’s, I think, what was missing is that it was lacking an investment in what we had done already. When I started writing the theme for the second trailer, Dan was very gracious and allowed me to sort of play with this. ‘Cause there were a lot of things to do at the time. We had a lot of features we were creating, a lot of content we were trying to create. But I felt like this trailer is gonna be something important and special. I want to pay special attention to it. This is when I was learning how to use the editor so that I could put a camera in the scene and then pan it off to the one side or zoom in and all these very basic things that now we take for granted. But at the time, it was like, “Whoa.”

Katie Postma:
The in-engine stuff?

Nick LaMartina:
Yeah. “Here’s Agnos and I’m gonna pan across here, and let’s look at the majesty and wonder of all these various artifacts and these spaces that we’ve been creating.” And that’s when, in my head, I started hearing this… it was the feeling of someone running through scenery. And it had this very, very quick bass line and the horns that were punctuating every time a new scene would come up. And that was the first time I really sort of indulged in, “OK, what is our game about? What is our identity?” And all I wanted to do was convey that. I wanted people to feel excited. I wanted them to see what made it special. And I didn’t know at the time that I was writing the theme for the title, and it wasn’t until David actually sat down with me and we looked at it together, and I looked at it with Dan, and then we said, “Wow, I think this is it.” It doesn’t feel like the TV show, it doesn’t feel like the movie. It feels like something new, and that’s really what we were going for, and that’s what we needed at the time. And again, I looked up some Latin lyrics from, I think it was The Travels of Boethius or something like that. But it was about cutting the head off a hydra and snakes and other kind of stuff, and it just fit so nicely with the goal theme and the Praxis and how all of those things would sort of tie in together. And I just loved the feeling of it. I loved the sound of it, and that’s when I had that warm feeling, “I’m actually on the right track here,” then it’s when we knew, “Yeah, this is the title theme.” I think at the time the title screen had just become functional. And you were sitting there at the gate, so it was in one of the desert scenes and you could see the gate. And I had a theme that I had written that was based on one of the sort of like the wonder themes from SG-1, where it was the very thin violin and then the oboes come in and they do this little da-na-da-na-da-na-da kinda thing. And it was like, “OK, like that feels good,” but then I stuck this new theme on it and it was like, “Damn, this is it right here. Like this feels right. This makes me wanna jump in there and go.” And that’s when I think all of us knew, “Yeah, this is actually the title theme now.”

Katie Postma:
That’s when it felt real.

David Read:
He found it. He hit it on the head.

Katie Postma:
Yes. You can see concept art and you can see design plans and you can talk to the AI specialist and see how the troops are gonna work and the enemies are gonna work. And then you hear the music and you’re like, “Oh, shit. We have something.” That moment. Oh my gosh.

Nick LaMartina:
When they played it on the USS Midway, to me that is one of the greatest achievements I’ve had in my career was seeing – I wasn’t there at the time, but I did get to see a video of them playing it on that ship. And just hearing the sound blast from note, ’cause they were talking with Richard Dean Anderson and I think Christopher Judge at that time, and you heard the blast of horns out of nowhere and they all turned and looked over to the screen. And I think Chris even said, “What the hell was that?”

David Read:
“That was a video game.”

Nick LaMartina:
It was a video game. Yep.

David Read:
They’re doing the teaser.

Katie Postma:
Was that before — because they were gonna show Continuum, but they showed our teaser first.

David Read:
I was there. I was there.

Katie Postma:
Thank goodness you were. The whole team should’ve been there.

David Read:
They should have. Dan was there. I brought Sam Dieter out with me. I had only recently been fired, like two or three months before. I was fired off of this project, by the way. But I’ll get into that a little bit later. And Dan had walked by Sam, and Sam was sitting in the press box. And Dan’s like, “What are you doing there?” He’s like, “I’m with David.” He’s like, “David Read?” He’s like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Oh, OK.” It was a weird night for me, seeing my friends still working on this thing, and me now working directly with 20th Century Fox.

Katie Postma:
But having that pain point so fresh.

David Read:
It was. And I’ll get to that later. And Nick’s music comes on, and the first thing I’m thinking is, because this is the first piece of music that we’re hearing out of these speakers, “This is way, way too loud.” That’s the first thing I’m saying, “They need to turn this thing down,” and they never did. And the second thing that I did was I turned around and I watched everyone, and they were gripped by this thing. Sucked them in. Completely sucked them in. And I was like, “This thing’s gonna kick ass.” And I was always your biggest fan, Nick. I knew what you wanted to do. I knew, synesthesia or not, how talented you and your twin brother were. And it was a matter of winding you up and letting you go.

Nick LaMartina:
Definitely. We had many different moments when you would come into my office and we would discuss the music and listen to it together. And that’s actually when I first realized, “This guy’s really valuable,” ’cause I was composing a piece of music, I can’t remember what planet it was for, but you listened to it and you said, “Is that “Threads?”” I was like, “What the hell is he talking about?” And you had just named the episode that I had drawn it from out of thin air. It’s like, “He’s gonna be really useful and a pain in the ass at the same time.”

Katie Postma:
This is why. I just knew. He lived and breathed Stargate. It wasn’t just that you were a fan, but you were a caretaker.

David Read:
Let’s burst the bubble. OK. I already introduced it. And I felt as if I was the torchbearer of the brand while I was there. And it wasn’t at all like, “Well, what I say goes.” It wasn’t anything like that. I felt very protective of Brad and Rob’s idea of what this thing was. And when, at a certain point in certain meetings — not the design meetings where I was a fly on the wall — but in certain meetings where I was at the table, I would illustrate that. And I remember having an argument with someone over the Asgard dancing. So, we’re not gonna talk about who it was, but R/Dance was a command in… Was it R Slash Dance, or just Slash Dance in Wow?

Katie Postma:
It was in everything. It was in every MMO. It’s Slash D.

David Read:
Slash D. There was already one of the first guilds getting ready to guild up and play as a group in a game was the Dancing Asgard Guild. The Asgard do not dance. It’s against their nature. And I remember having a conversation with someone very important in the project, who turned to me in the meeting and he said, “The Asgard will dance.” And I said, “OK, look. You guys are going out of your way to create something authentic to this world. You make the characters do something; you’ve just stripped the game of its authenticity by taking them out of character.” Now, I was never a “Don’t do this” and “I don’t have an idea” kind of person. I was like, OK, if they can’t do that, give them — each species — a character ability, like he can wave his hand and the drone that’s with him will project this thing of dancing characters or something, so that he can participate the way that he would. I’m not gonna bring myself to do this. That’s too beneath me, but I’ll present a hologram of something doing it.

Katie Postma:
It’ll be the reaction he would use when others did it.

David Read:
Exactly right. He would react in this way that I’m not gonna spend any time on this activity. I’m working over here with my mind. But I remember thinking at that time, in that meeting, I had crossed the Rubicon. And I never really had a great working relationship with this person to begin with, but when I was relegated away from the tasks that I was doing with the community management and placed into another spot, not in terms of where I was sitting or anything like that, I knew that I wasn’t probably long for the project because it was my first corporate environment gig. I am an only child. I have no clue how to get along with people and left certain things unsaid because I wanted this project to be a success so badly. And I really felt that I was representing the best interests of Brad and Rob in that space, even though it was none of my business to do so.

Katie Postma:
It was your business.

David Read:
There was a video that came out, the teaser. We called it Water, and it’s, throughout our history, men have crossed great expanses in order to expand horizons, yada and so forth. And it was an ocean, and the ocean materialized into the puddle.

Trailer Narrator [clip]:
Throughout our history, man has crossed great distances on missions of discovery, to explore new lands, uncover new life, and to expand empires.

David Read:
There was a debate about what they should say when they come through the Stargate, and one of the quotes was, “We come in peace. Wait, no, we don’t.” And I’m thinking to myself, we can’t use this one because it’s not true. We do come in peace. And there was a guy on the team who was like, “Oh yeah, we’re totally using that one.” And that’s what they went with, and I’m like, he’s not saying it tongue in cheek. The character isn’t. He actually thinks that that’s what it is. This is a terrible idea. And it went out. We got the video back, and my boss came to me and said, “What do you think?” And I said, “I think I hate it.” And his expression didn’t change. He was shocked that I was saying that.

Trailer Narrator [clip]:
But new worlds of adventure have always been just beneath the surface. We come in peace. “Wait, no, we don’t.”

David Read:
I said, “These characters come in peace. This guy over here, who I know doesn’t like the franchise, decided to run with it because it was his job. This is not going to work.” And Chris Klug came to me and he said that he had showed it to Brad Wright, and Brad had said, “Chris, what is this?” This same guy got to the end of SG-1 with the last show. He’s laughing at something. I’m like, “Finally, the guy’s laughing at something.” I turn around to him. I said, “What is it?” He says, “I effing hate this show.” Because they were required to watch it to catch themselves up on it. He’s doing his job, but he’s not feeling the show. I always bristled with that. Not knowing anything else. And then when I got called in in June of ’08 and saying, “We’re gonna let you go now. It’s nothing personal,” I was so humiliated from being taken off of this thing that I loved so much that it took me forever, forever to admit to anyone what actually happened, which was that I had been let go from this thing. And largely I would think because of character conflicts.

Katie Postma:
No. Some maybe, but no. OK. I was there, I was back by that time, we were working together —

David Read:
That’s the first problem, that you had to come back probably because of my inadequacies in some regard.

Katie Postma:
No. One of the things —

David Read:
I’m so sorry, Nick.

Katie Postma:
Nick, sorry.

David Read:
If it’s anyone, I’m glad it’s you here to listen to this, so bear witness.

Katie Postma:
There’s so much going on. So, number one, in meetings, as the number one fan in the room, you should always be asked for a gut check. That’s number one. Number two, there were people on the team – bristled is a really good word – that bristled at your depth and breadth of knowledge, your youth, your inexperience. Sure, great, all that. Fine. I’ve been in rooms where people bristle at me for much less. However, I wanna say something about Chris in particular. Chris and you both were there to be the guardians of what Brad and…

David Read:
He wrote – if I may insert real quick – a document that I still possess here. I’m trying to find it. That was basically an outline of what the ultimate goal of Stargate Worlds is, and Brad and Rob read it and said, “This is it.”

Katie Postma:
Brad and Robert, especially.

David Read:
To strive for earning ascension is essentially what it – and it was brilliant. I was like, “This guy gets it.” Chris got it. Always, 100%.

Katie Postma:
Chris is golden, and Chris understood the value of you. If he didn’t, or anybody actually that knew you, if they didn’t appreciate the how of it and how it was being done – maybe in a meeting where you’re supposed to be a fly on the wall, ’cause I was in those too – they still appreciated what was being said and done. And don’t think they didn’t walk away and second guess and say, “Should we?” And maybe, “You know what? We don’t have time.” A lot of it was budgetary or time constraints. So, it wasn’t all, “We can’t talk about this for another hour because we have eight other agenda items to get to.” There’s a lot of that going on.

David Read:
That’s a lot of work.

Katie Postma:
It is. You were one of a series of people that were let go in round whatever it was, A or B, because there were already some things in that year that were starting to… it was the beginning of the end. I was let go… Oh, man. You were let go in June; I was let go in late August. It wasn’t much later, David.

David Read:
Really? That fast?

Katie Postma:
Yeah. Here’s how I see it, because they probably didn’t like a lot of what I was… There was somebody on our team – when I say our, I mean you, me, marketing, PR, press. OK? On that team.

David Read:
Under Darren Steel.

Katie Postma:
Yeah. Darren was awesome and Jeremy was awesome, and a lot of other people were awesome. And there was one who, when I came back, was like, “Really?” They were not happy I was back. Trust me, you were not the only one who… You’re going to have personalities anywhere you go. OK. I thought for months, “Oh, I was let go because of that one guy not liking me.” Talked to him years later, had nothing to do with it. It was literally the beginning of the end. I would tell people, “Oh, I got thrown off the Titanic about three days before it hit the iceberg. You got thrown off five days before it hit the iceberg.” Some of what you say was probably a contributing factor to, “Hey, who can we cut in this round?” But it wasn’t, I have to tell you, it was not what you think. It was not all personality; it wasn’t all that kinda stuff. It was mostly, “We need to start jettisoning.” Because the ship’s starting to… I was even told in August when I was let go, “If things change, we can consider bringing you back, even bringing other community members back.”

David Read:
After you were gone, they reached out to me. And I went back in there and interviewed again. They reached out to me. Jake Johnson and I were really, really tight at that point. I asked him to be in the room there, because I said, “I want you to hear this and bear witness to whatever is gonna come out next.” Because they invited me in. And I wasn’t going to go in, get on my hands and knees and beg for this back. I sat at the head of the table in that thing, literally and figuratively, and I was like, “OK, where are you guys at right now? What do you need?” And I said what I was willing to do, and what needed to be done. And it was clear at that point that it was no longer going to fit. They had moved into a space where they were in such – Nick, I don’t even know if you were still there – they were in such a defense posture that…

Nick LaMartina:
I was there till ’09.

Katie Postma:
They were monitoring things.

Nick LaMartina:
I was there till ’09, so there was… I got to see this happen.

Katie Postma:
You went through it.

David Read:
And it wasn’t gonna happen.

Katie Postma:
Was this the Resistance yet? Was that the Resistance? Is that what you’re talking about?

David Read:
I don’t think Resistance was on the table at that point for me. But, Nick, were you there through Resistance?

Nick LaMartina:
No, I left right before Resistance got started, and I think, I don’t wanna say I was a linchpin, but I was the sound guy. After I left, it’s like, “We’ve gotta work with the content we have rather than what we think we’re gonna make.” I think when I left, that was one of those moments that they had to really figure out, “What the hell are we gonna do at this point?” Because they weren’t paying me. They weren’t paying anybody, and we just had to find our alternatives.

Katie Postma:
For people that don’t know the story, I think everybody can look it up and its public knowledge, but there was some mishandling of funds. Because they had to go through… I think. Didn’t they go through, not bankruptcy, but what is it called? But there were things like office chairs and computers that had to be claimed to kind of pay some of that stuff down. But there were game elements itself. I think because it was a newer time for video games, whether it was government or whatever agency that was working on behalf of the state, they didn’t really see the actual content, the digital content, the music and the visuals and all that stuff, as something saleable. So, they ended up giving that to Resistance folks, is my understanding.

Nick LaMartina:
I think that was a big problem with this game, from a very early point, which was that there was so little space between the investors and the developers. As a startup, I think part of that is inevitable. But we were trying to make a game we thought would be fun to play, and they were trying to create a business that would be profitable for…

David Read:
Snap games.

Nick LaMartina:
… a lot of the people that—

Katie Postma:
A money-making machine.

Nick LaMartina:
A money-making machine. For me, the big moment that I realized we were in trouble was when we had Frankie Muniz driving an F2 car with our logo on it, and I was like, “Ha, this is going down the drain pretty quick here.” And then there was that guy that came in that had something to do with credit card authorizations, and then they had their pyramid scheme going, where they were selling the game even though it wasn’t out yet. And then, at one point, I got asked to take a recording and change someone’s voice.

Katie Postma:
Selling memberships.

Nick LaMartina:
They were selling memberships, and then, at that same time, one of the board of directors came in and asked me, “Hey, can you take this recording and change this guy’s voice? He’s not supposed to be talking about this stuff.” And I was like, “I can’t. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” There were a lot of moments like that, where I kept feeling like I wanna make this game, but it kept looking more and more like something is seriously, seriously wrong, and I don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this. And I wasn’t–

Katie Postma:
That was at the very top unfortunately. The people doing it for love, as it was for me, were not part of that. I want to emphasize. From everyone that hired us, from everyone that worked on it, even people that didn’t enjoy the show as much as we did, they were still there to make something successful. First of all, to make a Stargate MMORPG, period, and not to own a telenovela channel and not to own a restaurant and I don’t know where… There were all these things, all these little rabbit holes of where the money was going, it was so bizarre. And that was from the very, very tippy-top, unfortunately.

David Read:
I don’t want us to spend a whole ton of time on this, but I want to throw my 30 seconds in real quick. My understanding was that the investors were coming in to put money in towards Stargate Worlds. And Social Networks at Play became a thing because they were working on a racing title. Is it Deadwood that they were working on as well? What’s the western that’s called? There was money that was designed for Stargate Worlds that instead was funneled into a portfolio of projects. The money wasn’t meant for that, was my understanding. And they really wanted to build the factory before the first product tasted good. They moved too fast. People were too ambitious. When, if they had this thing on its feet, Stargate will take care of you guys. But you need to build it first, before you start working on these two or three other titles.

Katie Postma:
We needed to ship one before we started… It wasn’t just one. There were two other games in development, maybe more. But yes. And unfortunately, those games were excellent too, amazing, amazing games.

David Read:
They were good games.

Katie Postma:
If you had come to me and said, “Should we make this?” Absolutely. Can you just give us – because we were in alpha. Right?

Nick LaMartina:
We were code content complete.

David Read:
Which means what, Nick?

Nick LaMartina:
Code content complete meant that we had everything in the game that we needed to ship. And we needed to polish it and get the bugs out so that we would have a stable product.

David Read:
Had the vertical slice been done?

Nick LaMartina:
Oh yeah, the vertical slice was done. We had multiple planets ready. And we were in the state of trying to get the performance of the engine to be acceptable.

Katie Postma:
We were letting in testers to stress test. So, we let in 10, and then we’d let in 25, and then we’d let in 50, and that was my mandate at the very, very end of my time there was choosing who those players actually were. Literally selecting…

Nick LaMartina:
And people were having fun. That’s what was so exciting about it, is that they were playing this game, they were having fun, they were investing themselves, they were roleplaying. All the stuff we wanted to see. And it was at that critical moment where the money was drying up and we were running out of resources to get the game made. It felt like every other week, we were having conversations with each other like, “Are you staying? Are you staying? ‘Cause if you don’t, if you go, I’m going too,” and fantasizing about, “When they pay me, I’m gonna pay off my student loan,” or, “I’m gonna get a new couch,” or, “I’m gonna pay rent.”

Katie Postma:
That’s how much they were behind, where people weren’t just thinking, “I’m gonna get groceries.” They were like, “I’m gonna pay off my car.” They were getting further and further behind. And you guys went through Christmas, too. That was the moment, David, where I was, “We were lucky to get out when we did.”

Nick LaMartina:
It got really hard when we were having conversations about loyalty, and I never wanted it to come down to that.

David Read:
I heard about this meeting. I’m not gonna get into it ’cause it’s someone else’s story to tell. Yeah, there were some upset people. The fact of the matter is, you guys created some amazing shit, and Katie, you and I are lucky enough to have been able to watch these people master so much of what it was that they were there to create. Nick, please tell me that you have some music as the sole dev on this particular episode to share with us that we can listen to?

Nick LaMartina:
Sure, do you have the trailer up right now?

David Read:
I think that I can absolutely pull it up. Give me a moment here. This was the one where I was like, “We found it. We found our sound.”

Nick LaMartina:
I loved playing with these shots here.

David Read:
Did you pull these together?

Nick LaMartina:
Yes. This was really fun to put together, this particular part right here. That was my voice. That was supposed to be the overture for our game. So, something I liked to do that was pretty rare back then, and is still rare, is I wrote from a manuscript. I didn’t use a piano roll; I didn’t write directly in the digital audio workstation. I had the engraver, I had my bars, I had my clefs and all the little notes, and that was an unusual way to write back then. But I had my degree in music composition, so I wanted to put everything together and get the voice leading right and stack those chords so that they would really pop. It was all orchestral samples from a… what was the library? It was an East-West or something orchestra. East-West Orchestra. But the technology at the time was amazing. Now it feels dated when I listen to it, but I still enjoy the feelings I get from “Oh, wow.” That’s the feeling that I was trying to create to get people excited when they saw that trailer. “I want to play this game.” And I feel like after going through certain iterations and getting feedback from people, that really was a hit. I’ll never forget hearing that played on the USS Midway. That was so cool. But the composition process was really… We had a lot of different themes with different worlds, and you mentioned Chris Klug. He was really heavily involved in that. We would actually have different designers come into my office and we would discuss their world and we would talk about, “Well, what does that sound like?” and, “What kind of music are you looking for?” and, “How fast do you think it’s gonna be?” And we would brainstorm, and then I would compose a bunch of stuff, write a little motif for it or a one-minute theme, and then the next designer would come in and we would talk about their world or their quest or whatever it might be. And then we had this iterative process of going back and forth. But Chris was always there, always trying to get the best out of me. I was really intimidated by him for a long time ’cause I felt like I can’t do anything other than spectacular work for this guy because he’s just so into what he’s doing. He’s such a high mark for what good enough is. And there were multiple times when he gave me some really difficult feedback where I felt like, “I can’t do this.” I remember–

David Read:
Chris did not mince words.

Nick LaMartina:
No, he didn’t. Not at all. And he even expressed his disappointment a couple of times. “This just doesn’t sound like what I think it should sound like.” I remember one time he said, “I thought I was giving you an opportunity here and I just am not hearing what I was expecting.” And I was crushed. But after getting to know him a little bit better and understanding, that’s why he’s also a wonderful educator, is that he gets the best out of people. He knows how to ask people for more so that they can reach their potential. And that’s really what was happening in those moments where we would have difficult conversations occasionally about the music I had written. I remember writing music for Agnos, and he said, “I want this – it’s too straight. I want this to feel sexier.” It’s like, “How do I make Agnos sound sexy?”

David Read:
They wanted to hire Mel Harris to be the Agnos AI ’cause it was an ancient world. It was a giant Atlantis.

Nick LaMartina:
But there were so many great moments when I felt like that collaboration between me and the designers was really creating this really organic world, that each planet had its own identity. And I felt like a lot of times I was getting away with stuff with regard to the type of music I was writing ’cause Lucia had all of the raiders and traders and stuff, and I wrote this sort of Western theme with guitars and sometimes they were distorted guitars and really going far with it. But every time, they absolutely loved it. I remember one particular moment when Howard Lyon made his ringtone the Lucian theme. I was like, “Oh, OK. I think I’m doing something right here, if they enjoy it that much where people are making their ringtone…” And he was not the only one. There were other people that were asking for little samples for their ringtones and their message tones and stuff. And then that’s when I felt like, “Oh, OK, this is moving in the right direction here.” I loved collaborating with people that way, to hear their thoughts and see how excited they would get when that music came out of the speakers for the first time and they could hear, “This is what my work sounds like.” I will always treasure those moments. Those were really great.

David Read:
The product was working. I remember giving a note in a design meeting on Agnos and the note basically was that the ancients, when we’ve seen them on Atlantis, they are at the end of a hundred-year war of defeat. And they’re about to sink the city and everything. We’ve never seen Atlantis really in its full glory in an era of peace. They have these huge towers. And this was after 9/11 and with the beams of light shooting up into the sky in New York. I’ll wager you in an era of peace, Atlantis lit like a beacon into the dark. Because that’s what it was. It was calling people for… The stairway says that, for crying out loud. When you translate the ancient, it actually does. And it was like, I bet those towers glowed. And Howard turned around and they did it. It’s in that trailer itself. And I always look at that as these folks, these devs, they listened to a lot of the feedback that they were getting and implemented it. I was so overjoyed the day that I was invited to go into Nick’s office and build this. And I want you to talk about this briefly, Nick. You were building an architecture that had…

Nick LaMartina:
The engage music system, I think, is what I called it.

David Read:
That’s true, but that as well. I also like that word. The music would, as your health lowered, get more intense with more percussion and everything else. So, you didn’t even have to look at it. You could turn off the UI. You had proximity triggers, where if you walked up to something… Unreal 3 wasn’t sophisticated enough to make a wind chime dangle in the breeze, but I remember taking a set of keys and making all this stuff, and you went and implemented this. So, as you approached it, you would hear it. You wouldn’t see it move… but you felt what was happening. And you designed that.

Nick LaMartina:
That was a really fun moment for me when I started figuring out the tools well enough that I could build features. And that’s sort of my bread and butter now, where I am a sound designer, but I also come up with clever solutions to problems where it seems like, “Well, we can’t do this right now.” But then my feeling is, “Well, let’s just explore a little bit and we’ll figure it out.” We had these towns that had all these different houses and these different little machines that were on them, and they weren’t moving and they didn’t have lights, and I thought, “I’m gonna make sound from them anyway,” because that’s what I expect when I walk into there. I wanna hear… I want this to be dilapidated. I want it to sound like things are breaking down. There were machines that would make beeps and they would grind, and they would start up rough, and then they would fall apart and make noises like that. It was the same with the engage music system that was adjusting itself based on not just what your health was, but it would predict, based on your level and the level of the characters that you’re fighting, what’s the likely outcome? Are you gonna die or are you gonna win, or is it gonna be difficult? Is it gonna be easy? And I loved basically trying to create this dynamic from the show, where some skirmishes were really easy, and they had this light music, and other times stuff was super serious and had big bombastic noise to it. The idea was to create this system, and we developed our own tools specifically to get the music to be sensitive to what those scenarios were. And boy, when it worked, it was so, so cool. I remember the first time we got it working and being in Lucia, and I was fighting one character and it was called Engage Grey. That was the lowest one. And then another guy joined and it jumped to Blue, and then two other enemies came in, and then all of a sudden, the big, really radical music came in. It was this driving force. It was mean, it was threatening. And I remember feeling, “Oh my gosh, I’m scared now. What do I do in this scenario? How do I get out of this? I gotta go find cover.” And to be able to write the music, and it felt like, “OK, this is a fun composition. I wrote a song.” But then to play the game and feel it move and inspire me to do things, it was… And to me that was so incredibly gratifying to get to that point where I was able to make music that made me move and made me change my behavior. And I felt like, “If I can do this to myself, certainly the players are gonna respond to it too.” And we got a lot of great feedback on it.

David Read:
You created an experience. That’s it. I remember, I can’t remember what planet it was from. Irene and Shad and Carl and Eric, that were our animators at the time, and they created this… You had wanted to give life to… This is before I was gone. You had wanted to give life to a robot, an object, and you hadn’t really created sound around a character yet. I wish I had saved this file. There are so many files I wish I had saved. But it just looks like a box just sitting there. Harmless. And in about a second and a half, it unfolds into something not unlike ED-209. And Nick had gone in, and he gave this guy character. As he unfolds, not unlike a transformer, and all of these elements, you can hear him kinda grunting and talking mechanically, and he’s in his defense position, and then he collapses down again. There’s like, “Oh, all right.” Sounding like this grumpy old man in the sound design of these mechanical sounds he put together. We had it in one of the meetings, and we all looked at each other, like, “He gave that character life.” They animated it, they made it look cool, but the soul of the thing came from you.

Nick LaMartina:
And that’s what I love so much about the art of sound design is that it does things that can be very unpredictable, but it also breathes life into things that is not there until the sound is there because, ultimately, you’ve got the visuals that tell the story, you’ve got the animation that tells you a little bit about its composition, but then the sound really… it complements every other part of the art, where suddenly we know how heavy something is, how fast is it moving? What is it made of? What technology is behind it? All of these things can be told in just an instant, but sound as an in-time art allows us to develop that over time in a way that the other arts don’t always have the luxury of. And that’s what I’ve always loved about it is that we could take… we could do those things where we would have characters that looked unique or moved in a certain way or were certain colors or shapes and then try to figure out, “OK, thematically, what are we trying to communicate here?” And then when we would give them a voice, and then suddenly, it’s like, “Wow, this thing is alive, and it has a distinct personality and a feeling to it and how we’re supposed to respond.” Those are the moments I live for when it comes to life as a sound designer is giving people a moment where suddenly their creation is alive, and until it has sound, it’s just pictures, and I greatly admire the other disciplines for what they’re able to do, but I’ve always felt like sound designers really have the best job out of all of the disciplines because they suddenly are allowed… they have the ability to make something alive that was not there previously. There’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with that because a great sound can elevate a bad model to something really quite extraordinary, but it also can ruin a great model if you’re not careful, and that’s an element of sound design that I’ve always loved being able to do. And there were so many moments when they would have characters that they would make stuff for, and we would add sound to it and show it in meetings and… Or it was even something simple like, they had, the art team was making explosion visuals for throwing grenades, and there was one particular… This was when I started going to the art reviews because we didn’t have a sound review meeting, and so we were like, “Well, we gotta put him somewhere. Let’s put him in the art review,”

David Read:
That’s right! Where does he go?

Nick LaMartina:
There was this particular visual effect that they had done for the grenades, and I thought, “I wanna do speed of sound propagation.” If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically the idea that the visuals hit you first, and then the sound comes after, and I had this idea, “OK, I’m gonna create three of those different grenades in this flat world. I’m gonna fire them off, and they’re gonna hear how the quality of the sound changes and the way the delay comes in and all of a sudden it’s gonna create this scenario where people will feel like their world is alive.” And I remember that first grenade going off, and they reacted like, “OK, cool. It’s a grenade.” And then the second one went off, it was a little more muffled, a little delayed, and I could see they started to think about it, and then the last one way off in the distance went off. There was this light poof, and then after a long delay, I looked at all of them, and their mouths were literally hanging open. And they said, “How did you do that?” And I was like, “I just put these tools together. I had an idea. I wanted to create this thing.” And so we actually used that for the entire ability system where not only was speed of sound propagation a part of it, but it was also based — and this is super nerdy — but we based it on the temperature of each planet. So, the cold places the sound would travel faster versus warm places, or vice versa. I can’t remember exactly which one it was, but basically depending on the temperature of the planet, the speed of sound would propagate differently. And the quality; and also, the humidity, the atmosphere would change how much was absorbed as it grew further and further distant on the horizon. We were doing stuff like this in 2008, and games really don’t delve into that kind of detail right now; sometimes for good reason. It was so thrilling to make that kind of stuff and surprise people with what you could do with this technology, and then we would build up on top of that, and that’s where so many of these cool features came from. It was experimentation.

David Read:
That’s it. That’s exactly it. Katie, who do you miss the most from that project? Present company considered. And what do you miss the most from that project? I’m curious.

Katie Postma:
So, this is a trick question because I keep in touch with all my favorite people. Sorry, Nick. No, no. No, I don’t. I keep in touch with probably three or four only, and David, you’re included in that. When you think about the team, I think at the peak, we were at, what was it, 160, 170? When you included the three studios, when you included the overarching FireSky publishing team — ’cause we decided to build a publishing team to self-publish, ’cause why not? When you consider the four teams, I’ll say. So, OK. So, who do I miss the most is probably just everybody as a unit. I really loved that whole team. And what I miss the most is the fact that we could… Like you said it. You used words earlier. Sorry. You said something about we had it. It was working. Everything was working. The fact that we had almost 80,000 people, sight unseen, come to this place and wait for this thing. And then, when they heard the theme, when they saw the trailers, when they got to test those first worlds, when they woke up in the game, ’cause that’s what happens…

David Read:
Out of stasis.

Katie Postma:
… in many games. When they woke up in that world, then their patience and all the kibitzing paid off. All of a sudden, it was all worth it. All those growing pains were worth it. But not just for the community. For all of us. It was in those incredible moments, and there were so many. So, I miss working on an MMORPG for that reason. I play them, but I don’t work on them anymore. I do work on multiplayer games, play with 12 people or play with five people. But those huge, massive worlds and that undertaking, I loved all the elements. I miss the producers and I miss the artists and I miss talking to Nick and I miss talking to Max about security considerations. What layers of accountability are we gonna consider? We have their email, for example, or we have this information. Steam, I don’t think, was even a real thing. There were so many considerations–

David Read:
It wasn’t what it is now.

Katie Postma:
Were we gonna be cross-platform? There were so, so many things that… there’s so much that goes into it that people don’t realize. They’re like, “You know what? Draw some pretty pictures, have them animated, you write a pretty song, and away we go.” But there’s so many… It’s the minutiae. It’s every day you talk to somebody about what they’re doing. I had hours-long talks with Bill about the way that AI was gonna move that had never been seen in a game before. The fact that I walk in with my team hopefully, and we see some enemies straight ahead, and as soon as we fire, two of them flank, and that’s AI? Now it’s everywhere, but at the time, never before had it… It was like, if person A does this, then AI bot B will do that. They were–

David Read:
They’re not coming straight at you. They are coordinating with each other, and that was the extraordinary thing about that technology, along with the cover design. The cover had never been done in an MMO before until Tabula Rasa came over and they got a preview of it. And then, the following Monday, they announced that they were putting cover in their game. Well, boys, that’s – I couldn’t believe that! Because Tabula Rasa beat us to launch. Yeah. Man, oh man.

Katie Postma:
I just hope everybody’s proud. It had its ups and downs, but I hope everyone’s proud. The sheer amount that was accomplished in that three and a half years is huge. I miss that. I miss the collab of a huge team. I miss being able to run to the other building and say, “What are you guys working on?” That was fun. Those two games were fun and I wanted to play them. I guess what I’ll say is, there are a lot of people that I miss, but I reach out when I miss them, and I really miss playing the game the most, I think. I will miss that most of all because I was already a Stargate fan. I became a Stargate mega-fan, and then I worked on this game that I wanted to play. I could’ve played it all day every day. And I’m playing other stuff instead that is almost as good. And I… That’s the thing I miss the most, is that people didn’t get to see and feel the breeze on their face and hear the theme in their ears when they wake up in that world. I really miss that. I’ll miss that the most, I think. I have missed that these past, what is it, 20 years?

Nick LaMartina:
20 years.

David Read:
Almost. Yeah.

Katie Postma:
That’s what I’ve missed. When I look back, when you say, “Hey, come on the show, and let’s talk about this,” or when I hear them announce the new show, I look back at the worlds that were created at Cheyenne, and I miss it. I miss the worlds that were being created. They were pretty phenomenal.

Nick LaMartina:
I feel very much the same way. I miss different people for different reasons. I miss working with Rebeca. She had a wonderful, positive energy about her all the time.

David Read:
Rebeca Orozco.

Nick LaMartina:
I miss working with Dan, especially with his leadership. I felt like he always had our best interest in mind, and he was very calm about how we would deal with all types of issues. I miss working with Chris for his vision and the way he drove me to be a better sound designer and composer. I miss Jason and playing with Peanut when we would go downstairs and have lunch, and we would play with Peanut together.

Katie Postma:
The squirrel. Wasn’t it?

Nick LaMartina:
No, my Corgi.

David Read:
Peanut was his Corgi.

Katie Postma:
Oh, your dog. No, somebody would feed the squirrels. They’d line up, and then when we went in, we’d look back, and there was a squirrel there.

David Read:
Was that Jim? That sounds like Jim would have done that.

Katie Postma:
Maybe.

David Read:
I miss Peanut.

Nick LaMartina:
Peanut was great. And Carl, I loved the work that he would get out of his team. Howard for his vision. There were so many very talented people that I think that’s really something unique that I had with that experience that has not been replicated since then. Every studio I’ve worked with has been different. I like people for different reasons. I like the products for different reasons. But what I loved about that one in particular is that it felt like everything is possible. And when there weren’t those moments worrying about, “Oh my God, how are we gonna get this done and how are we gonna finance it?” and all the other stuff that came with that, when that wasn’t happening, it was this truly beautiful moment of… this series of moments of working with each other to figure out, how do we take this thing that we love so much and give people the opportunity to stomp around in this world for real? Because for so many of them, it was wish fulfillment. It was indulging in the fantasy of, “I want to be a hero. I want to liberate oppressed cultures. I want to ascend. I want to level up. I want to…” There are all kinds of things that people would fantasize about doing if I was in the Stargate world in some way, and that’s the fantasy that we were providing for them. And to go through that process and play that game… That was another big thing for me, was when we first started playing it internally and realizing, “I’m having fun.” This is not this rickety, sort of slapdash product that I’m beta testing because I’ve gotta get some stuff tested, because I’ve gotta fix bugs or whatever. It was, “I am playing, and I’m having fun.” And to graduate from, “We’re making a product, and we’re trying to get paid,” to, “This is something I care about and something I’m excited about, and I want to work even harder so that I can provide the fans that same experience.” That is, I think, the thing that I take away from that. It was that… when things felt so collaborative and so possible. And knowing the nature of the world was that there was nothing that we could come up with that wasn’t gonna fit in there some way. That no matter how alien the world might be, whatever ideas we had, we could find some way to connect it to the universe. And I think that’s part of what made it so special. But also, such a difficult property to work with, because the vision had to be narrowed in some way, and sometimes we had to give up stuff that we wanted, and that was… that push and pull is part of any development process. But I think that’s really what I loved the most about this project, was that everything felt possible in a few moments. And I miss that a lot. I miss working with those folks. I miss feeling how open the possibilities were. And as I reflect now, thinking about how my career has changed over the last 20 years, I think it was that innocent youthful exuberance for, “What can we do?” that I think I need to tell myself, “You can still have that.” It doesn’t matter what project you’re working on, what crew you’re working with, or if it’s video games, if it’s movies, if it’s… It doesn’t matter. Everyone needs to have their crew and feel like the world is full of possibilities, and that’s really what that was for me, and that’s what I miss the most.

David Read:
You have a small studio, and you have ambitious, bright-eyed people who are ready to get to work. There is a Daniel Jackson wonder in that glint in their eye, and everyone had it. They knew what they were doing in terms of hiring people. You guys are right. This is the 20-year anniversary of this thing coming online, and it’s my hope, along with Katie, that this is part one of a continuing series over the course of the next year or so of people coming in and taking stock of that time in their lives and what it meant to them and the good parts about it as well as the bad and sharing some of the things that they created. Sharing some of their art, their sound design, what they have that they still possess that the fandom deserves to see. I’ll just leave it at that because there was a lot there, and there’s a lot of stories to be told.

Nick LaMartina:
Absolutely. And I feel grateful to have taken part in that. I feel grateful for working with both of you for that, for what feels like a very short time when I look back on it. But I can’t think of a product or a team that I would have rather gotten my career started with. There are so many different routes my life could have taken, and to go down to the high desert of Arizona and meet all of those people and work on something that really felt like it had so much potential was… I can’t convey how grateful I am that that was how I got things started, because really that feeling and that idea of what can we do with our creativity has driven me for these last 20 years. And it’s something I reach back to all the time, and I feel so grateful that this was the way I got my career started.

Katie Postma:
It was such a great hire for the team to get you. Holy Dinah. You were doing stuff even then. We knew you were incredibly special. I’m so proud to have worked with you, my goodness.

David Read:
I gotta share a little anecdote about Nick. We had been talking at one point about our connection between us, and I have always considered… I dropped this term earlier, synesthesia. You should really look it up because it’s fascinating, and I’d never met anyone with it before. So, he and his twin brother Nate possess it, but Nick visualizes things when he hears sound and Nate hears music when he draws. Is that right, Nick?

Nick LaMartina:
That’s correct.

David Read:
And I always was bothered by the sound of my voice. I didn’t get into radio because I thought I had a good voice, I got into radio because my buddy needed a replacement, and I had gotten into a conversation with Nick at one point about something like that, and he was saying that one of the reasons that I enjoy being around you is because of the sound that you make, not just the things that you say. I’m like, “What do you mean?” He says, “You’re smooth red.” I’m like, “What the hell does that mean?” And he was articulating what he perceives in my voice, and those traits have moods to him, and evidently that was one that was on the more soothing end to him. And it was one of those great compliments of my life, where someone who has a superpower, a literal superpower, utilizes it in such a way that it makes me come off as more than some… There was something that felt really good about that. I will never forget that.

Nick LaMartina:
I’m really happy to hear that. That was a big part of the culture down there too, was how do we all fit together and what do we mean to each other? ‘Cause there were a lot of moments we were hanging — ’cause a lot of us moved our families down there, or by ourselves, and were trying to find places that we could hang out and ways we could spend our time together, and those moments that we found were — this is how we can communicate with one another; this is how we relate to one another. And we did create our own culture there out of really out of nothing. It was dry and barren down there, and this was this sweet, fun, expressive culture that we made there, and it was really great to be able to share those moments with each other. I’ll never forget it.

Katie Postma:
That office was such an oasis

David Read:
An oasis in the 130-degree heat. That’s what it was.

Katie Postma:
You’d walk in and there was a gate, and there was an Asgard, and it was cool, and it was dark, and it was quiet. You understood people were working. We respected each other’s spaces. Nick was shut up in his cave.

David Read:
He was making a lot of noise in that space.

Katie Postma:
Do you remember, I don’t know where you sat, David, ’cause you said you ended up moving downstairs…

David Read:
All over.

Katie Postma:
… which breaks my heart. Did you sit over where Darren and Jeremy were at one point too, over there?

David Read:
I was everywhere on that floor.

Katie Postma:
‘Cause I would park myself — there was a tiny little corner — you remember where Nick–

David Read:
Around the corner there, and then the back was engineering.

Katie Postma:
So, I was between engineering and Carl’s team. I would sit in that little corner, and… who did you take to Comic-Con?

David Read:
Sam Deiter.

Katie Postma:
Sam. So, I could see Sam. I was kind of between Sam and Max. But I could hear things that Chris was saying, and I could hear things that first Stu and then Howard were saying. They offered, they said, “Do you wanna be down with Joe, and Jim, and those guys?” And I was like, “No, no, no, no, I gotta sit in the thick of it.” I had to, ’cause I had to — as you said — soak it all in. And Chris would say, “Let me know which meetings you wanna sit in.” And I’m like, “Well, how many are there?”

David Read:
He was great about that.

Katie Postma:
I was in every single… The other thing that Chris did, which Nick alluded to… Now company culture is kind of a buzzword, and you wanna choose a team with a culture that you like. At the time, I remember Chris saying, “Let us know who you can use and how you can use them.” That was huge to me. I had never heard that before. I was always pulling teeth to get content. I felt like I was chasing people down and begging. And he literally said, “Whatever we have that you can use, how about my time? How about I write an ongoing column? Or how about – have you heard what Nick’s created yet? You should sit down with this and then we can choose an excerpt that you’re gonna release to the fans.” I was so used to saying, “Please, sir, may I have some more?” And he was literally saying, “We don’t have a lot that we can share but whatever else, however else we can help.” That culture building was a trust, I think, that we all had. We felt like we were all in it together. It wasn’t the battle of the departments and it wasn’t the top-down stuff. Everybody was in it together and everybody was valued for their contributions. I loved that.

David Read:
I loved the time that I got to spend with both of you. I had a Dachshund, Dez. Destin wasn’t thrilled with being with others. He was very chilled with being alone but he and Peanut got along like they were the best of buddies. And Peanut stayed with us a couple of times. You took care of Dez. We went to the dog parks together. You told me that Peanut would see other Dachshunds years later and run towards them just to see if it was Dez. And those are really fond memories that I hold, and Katie, I cannot thank you enough for getting me involved in this thing and really kickstarting me into this. I’m so thankful for our meeting and our relationship since. It means so much to me that you both came on to be a part of this and hopefully kickstart something special on this channel. Thank you both.

Nick LaMartina:
Absolutely. True pleasure. I’m always happy to reminisce, and this was special. I really appreciate it.

Katie Postma:
Thanks for being the caretaker, David.

David Read:
Thanks so much to Nick and to Katie for coming on and sharing their memories of the project. I really hope that you found that insightful. It was a thrill to be able to have them on and to discuss this part of our lives together. There is so much that went on there that was in development that was so cool. And to get them to articulate some of those ideas and share them with fandom for preservation into this oral history is really important to me. If you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, hit the Like button. It really does make a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. And if you wanna be aware of these individual videos before they come out, hit Subscribe and giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes as well. Really appreciate you tuning in to the Oral History Project. We’ve got a number of shows heading your way as Season Six continues and our excitement builds for this fourth television series. Tremendous thanks to my moderators, my developers. There are so many people now involved in this thing that I can’t really do any of them justice by sitting here and reeling them off for five minutes. So, I’m gonna let the end credits tell that story. And after that, we will actually have a bit of a coda. My original interview with Nick LaMartina, the first video thing that I posted at Stargate Worlds, which is kinda fitting, is coming immediately after that. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the other side.

Nick LaMartina [clip]:
Hi, I’m Nick LaMartina. I’m the sound designer for Stargate Worlds. My background really is in music and sound editing and engineering. My wife was looking around for companies to outsource our work to and then she found this company called Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. They were looking for a full-time sound person. I was like, “They certainly have to have music for this Stargate game that they’re making.” So, we decided to talk to them, and eventually we ended up out here, actually working full-time with them. I’m now working full-time with them, and I have all the compositional work I could possibly want.

Andrew Stein [clip]:
He’s kinda goofy.

Rebecca Orozco [clip]:
Nick’s a sweetheart. I love him to death.

Andrew Stein [clip]:
Nick is an oddball.

Rebecca Orozco [clip]:
He has this little dog that he loves so much, and if you wanna see Nick smile, you have to ask him about Peanut, and he’ll sort of light up and go exciting. He’s also really good at Wii Bowling, and he’s beaten me, humiliated me several times.

Nick LaMartina [clip]:
It’s Stargate words.

Nick LaMartina [clip]:
I certainly think that Stargate has some interesting musical ideas that can be explored from the premise of gate travel, because going into this wormhole basically, and not knowing what’s on the other side, it’s this idea of unpredictability, and consequently, there are musical possibilities that can be explored. That each world basically has to have its own musical identity. It has to have its own creative identity so that it’s an impression that when you first walk out, here’s the presentation. Here’s the big lights and trumpets and everything else that’s telling you the story about this when you first come out. And I think that’s a really neat device that can be used, that if you’re always exploring and seeing new things, aurally and emotionally, something has to be happening to facilitate that.

Andrew Stein [clip]:
We were going through some different sound effects, and we came across the gold ribbon weapons, and we had first pass sounds at it. We came across one of them that had this… it was like a human voice up underneath it that really added an eerie level to it, and I thought, “What if we could do that to all the ribbon weapons to really give it that eerie kind of tribal feel to it?” He was all over it. He took it, ran with it, and added in a lot of the different sound effects. We tried out a bunch of different things, and now when those ribbon weapons go off, or certain weapons are used, you can hear this kind of chanting undertone in the sound effect that really adds an incredible feel to it when you hear it. When you pick up on it. You can’t pick up on the actual detail, but your brain says, “Something is just not right with this thing.” It’s really cool. It tickles me to do that kind of stuff.

Nick LaMartina [clip]:
We have… Where’s the debris falling? This is where dirt and kind of stuff falls out of a ceiling, and so there’s a dirt attack, a dirt sustain, a rock sustain, a dirt release, and a metal release, and all of these have five different variants, and they also have the option of not playing, depending on how I weight it. So, when the cursor comes by here… Let me turn it up again. You get a number of different sounds. And the number of possibilities, I think, is 525 different combinations that can play off this single event. So, in terms of the sound, it’s very, very lifelike. It’s very, I wouldn’t say engrossing, but it doesn’t annoy the player as much, because they’re not hearing the same thing over and over again. But another thing this provides is that this package is able to determine on its own how this is going to sound, because I’ve already sequenced it on this timeline canvas, so that the game code can just say once, “Fall debris. Fall debris. Fall debris.” And we’ve got 525 different combinations that can spring out of that. But then even more so when you take into account each one of these different events can adjust its pitch on a random basis, or its volume on a random basis. So, overall, the audio quality in Stargate Worlds is aimed at being variable. Being dynamic, and so it’s not going to imitate life, of course, because we can’t go in there with a little pencil and say, “I’m going to draw this waveform.” But we can still combine a number of different things and then adjust them dynamically, depending on the play experience or by predetermined behaviors so that, overall, it becomes more lifelike, and we don’t hear the same thing over and over again. I think the most exciting part about it is knowing that I’m going to be writing better when it’s done. I never want to have my creative, or emotional, or philosophical, or whatever… I don’t want any of that stuff ever done. I always want to be growing and changing, and by identifying with an emotional and creative art through self-expression, that becomes a very powerful way to grow up. And music provides me with those opportunities. So, to think then, instead I can sort of look at that end goal and think, “Boy, there’s a lot of work to do.” And there is, but at the same time, I can also look at that and say, “There are sure a lot of opportunities to change and be something different.” And that’s more exciting to me than I am fearful of it.